Writing from New York City this weekend. As I’ve been discussing photo ‘authorship’ lately in my posts and my in-person workshop, NY is an interesting case study.

What are you going to shoot there that a) hasn’t been done a thousand times by some of the greatest photographers who ever lived, or b) doesn’t recycle past notions of what the city actually is now?

For years I couldn’t photograph in the city at all. Not one picture. Basically I couldn’t answer those questions for myself, so I was completely paralyzed, short-circuited. I didn’t have a point of view, couldn’t even fathom what that might be.

In the middle chunk of the 20th century there was something called the New York School in photography. It wasn’t a school but sort of a very loose, retroactive grouping of photographers, over several decades, who brought new visual approaches to representing the ever-evolving city. There is some debate over who falls into that ‘school’, and it’s unlikely they thought of themselves as such at the time, but some better-known names include Saul Leiter, Louis Faurer, Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson, William Klein, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, and Weegee.

*Diane Arbus photographing at a beauty pageant, by William Gedney*

Photo-authors all. Not describing but interpreting the city, expressing their ideas in personal ways. What united them was a fascination with the city’s complex character and energy and how to convey it in pictures with new visual vocabulary. There was a lot of film noir influence, motion blur, abstraction, layering, graininess, chiaroscuro (contrast of light and dark), and surrealism, combined with a tough-minded humanism.

Places change of course. Like the mid-century Paris of berets, cafes, and baguettes, the New York they knew is gone. It’s a different beast now and requires new visual vocabulary.

So what to do? I remember first visiting then-derelict New York in the early 80s and being somewhat shocked and terrified, but at least it had that CBGBs seedy-but-cool thing. Now it’s more like the terror of banality, too many puffy coats and Disney-fication gone amok. Good luck finding counterculture (or maybe I’m just old), or anything other than shopping or places to otherwise spend your money. At least it’s cleaner.

Some years ago I photographed New York for a European magazine that wanted to show how certain areas were being cleaned up and modernized. Bike lanes, waterfronts, pedestrian zones, that sort of thing. Actually a refreshing take, usually foreign editors go looking for the wacky American extremes.

While shooting I remember thinking, wow, parts of this city are actually QUITE NICE now. Maybe even, dare I say it, beautiful.

Don’t get me wrong, as a series title I don’t mean New York is Beautiful literally. I don’t know, maybe sardonic is the word. Of course New York is not conventionally beautiful and probably never will be. No sane New Yorker, even those who love it, would say it is beautiful. It’s almost anti-beautiful.

But as a contradictory statement, that half serious, half tongue-in-cheek notion finally gave me a starting point. NYIB is actually *two* contrasting sets from the last 10-15 years.

One that I’ve posted about before is experimental. They’re in my print gallery if you want one over your sofa. If you don’t feel like clicking through, here they are:

To me those are a nod to the disorienting, queasy, almost sci-fi dystopia I first experienced. A city out of control, that I could imagine collapsing on itself. I mean I grew up on The Warriors and Escape from New York. But the visual effect is also beautiful. It’s actually a fairly simple analog technique via one of my former students: shooting through cheap kaleidoscope sunglasses I found in a museum gift shop.

To call New York beautiful - or to make it look strangely beautiful - you need something stronger than rose-colored glasses. Maybe kaleidoscope glasses are more up to the job.

The other NYIB set I’ve sat on for a while, I’m showing them here for the first time. It’s sort of the opposite approach: still NY-as-Oz but direct not abstract. Not trying too hard to be something. More like low-key, calm observations that have grown on me.

It’s been helpful to chew on these over time. Even put them aside for a few years to gain some distance. They’re certainly not eye-candy as much as the first set, it’s a very different ‘language’. A couple of bangers maybe but overall leaving room for quieter pics to breathe. Circling back to it now through an authorship lens, they at least feel like mine, that they belong together, and they feel true. Sometimes it takes a while to add up.

Or do they add up? Not sure what they ultimately say about NY, but then again I’m not sure what I ultimately feel about it. Walking around this evening, before my Sunday morning post tomorrow, I had the usual feeling of being simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the city and the people. We passed through formerly tattered St Marks Place, which I first saw in its grungy punk heyday. It’s spiffed up now, does that make it better or worse?

The city is both impressive and hopeless. Uniquely vibrant and utterly pointless. Fascinating and boring. Energizing and tiring. After a few days I’ve usually had enough.

One could never say everything about New York in photos, that’s for sure. Sort of like the country as a whole, anything you might say is probably both true and false, depending on who you are and how/where/when you look at it.

Both true and false. Sort of like the statement New York is Beautiful.

Saul Leiter seemed to get that with New York you finally give up on sweeping, profound statements. When he got older he was known for mostly semi-abstract color street scenes, content to stay more or less in one neighborhood. In a poignant line in a lovely documentary about Leiter in his final years, he says “if I didn’t do anything more than make my little [photo] book, wouldn’t that have been enough?”.

Notebook